came incorporated in new
religious systems. Five years of civil war could not exhaust the
royalism of the Presbyterians, and it required the expulsion of the
majority to make the Long Parliament abandon monarchy. It had defended
the constitution against the crown with legal arts, defending precedent
against innovation, and setting up an ideal in the past which, with all
the learning of Selden and of Prynne, was less certain than the Puritan
statesmen supposed. The Independents brought in a new principle.
Tradition had no authority for them, and the past no virtue. Liberty of
conscience, a thing not to be found in the constitution, was more prized
by many of them than all the statutes of the Plantagenets. Their idea
that each congregation should govern itself abolished the force which is
needed to preserve unity, and deprived monarchy of the weapon which made
it injurious to freedom. An immense revolutionary energy resided in
their doctrine, and it took root in America, and deeply coloured
political thought in later times. But in England the sectarian democracy
was strong only to destroy. Cromwell refused to be bound by it; and John
Lilburne, the boldest thinker among English democrats, declared that it
would be better for liberty to bring back Charles Stuart than to live
under the sword of the Protector.

Lilburne was among the first to understand the real conditions of
democracy, and the obstacle to its success in England. Equality of power
could not be preserved, except by violence, together with an extreme
inequality of possessions. There would always be danger, if power was
not made to wait on property, that property would go to those who had
the power. This idea of the necessary balance of property, developed by
Harrington, and adopted by Milton in his later pamphlets, appeared to
Toland, and even to John Adams, as important as the invention of
printing, or the discovery of the circulation of the blood. At least it
indicates the true explanation of the strange completeness with which
the Republican party had vanished, a dozen years after the solemn trial
and execution of the King. No extremity of misgovernment was able to
revive it. When the treason of Charles II. against the constitution was
divulged, and the Whigs plotted to expel the incorrigible dynasty, their
aspirations went no farther than a Venetian oligarchy, with Monmouth for
Doge. The Revolution of 1688 confined power to the aristocracy of
freeholders. T